A Historical Guide to James Baldwin

Douglas Field

Offers an interdisciplinary study of Baldwin's life and work-the essays here are penned by scholars of American literature, history, music, and religious studies.

Includes an expansive bibliography that will be an indispensable guide for anyone wishing to pursue further study of Baldwin as a novelist, activist, and former preacher.

Features twenty-seven illustrations that chronicle the major events of Baldiwn's life.

A Historical Guide to James Baldwin

Douglas Field

Description

With contributions from major scholars of African American literature, history, and cultural studies, A Historical Guide to James Baldwin focuses on the four tumultous decades that defined the great author's life and art. Providing a comprehensive examination of Baldwin's varied body of work that includes short stories, novels, and polemical essays, this collection reflects the major events that left an indelible imprint on the iconic writer: civil rights, black nationalism and the struggle for gay rights in the pre- and post-Stonewall eras. The essays also highlight Baldwin's under-studied role as a trans-Atlantic writer, his lifelong struggle with faith, and his use of music, especially the blues, as a key to unlock the mysteries of his identity as an exile, an
artist, and a black American in a racially hostile era.

Challenging the American Conscience, Re-imagining American Identity:James Baldwin and the Civil Rights MovementLynn Orilla Scott

A Historical Guide to James Baldwin

Douglas Field

Author Information

Douglas Field is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Staffordshire University, UK and he is the book review editor for Callaloo.

Contributors:

DOUGLAS FIELD is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Staffordshire University, UK. He is the editor of American Cold War Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and has written on James Baldwin, jazz and religion for a number of journals including Genre, Wasafiri, Literature and Theology and the Guardian. He is the book review editor for Callaloo and is the author of the forthcoming book James Baldwin (Writers and Their Work).

CLARENCE HARDY is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He has written several articles in the Journal of Religion, Church History and American Quarterly and is the author of James Baldwin's God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture (University
of Tennessee Press, 2003). He is currently working on a book, CAROL E. HENDERSON is Associate Director of Black American Studies and Associate Professor of English and Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark. She has published extensively on African American literature and culture and her articles and books on Baldwin include: " in James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, eds. Lovalerie King and Lynn O. Scott
(Palgrave 2006), and is the editor of James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2006). She is also the author of a monograph, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (U of Missouri 2002).

JUSTIN A. JOYCE is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A three-time NCAA Academic All-American as a competitor for the UIC Men's Gymnastics team, his publications include a co-edited collection of essays, A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader (2006), and an essay RANDAL KENAN is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His first novel, A Visitation of Spirits was published by Grove Press in 1989 and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace (Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992). He is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. His latest book, The Fire This Time, a personal response to Baldwin's first
collection of essays, was published by Melville House in 2007.

DWIGHT A. MCBRIDE is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of African American Studies, English, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His published essays are in the areas of race theory and black queer studies. He is author of Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (2001, NYU Press) and Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (2005, NYU Press), both of which were nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. The latter was also a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award. He is the editor of James Baldwin Now (1999, NYU Press), co-editor of a special issue of the journal Callaloo titled D. QUENTIN MILLER Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, is the editor of two collections of essays: Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States (McFarland, 2005) and Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (Temple University Press, 2000). He is also the author of Drawing the Iron Curtain:
John Updike and the Cold War (University of Missouri Press, 2001) and the editor or co-editor of three textbooks: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Generation of Ideas: A Thematic Reader, and Connections: Literature for Composition. He has published eight reference volume entries on Baldwin and a number of essays on Baldwin and other American writers, including Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Leonard Peltier, and Ernest Hemingway. He is currently working on a book on Baldwin in the context of the law.

LYNN ORILLA SCOTT is a Visiting Assistant Professor at James Madison College which is a Residential College of Public Policy within Michigan State University. Her publications on Baldwin include: James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (Michigan State
University Press, 2002); Co-editor with Lovalerie King, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006). This includes her essay: " in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic Literature, ed. Emmanuel Nelson and MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA is Associate Professor for the Program in American Culture and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Her main publications on Baldwin include: James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University Press 2008); " Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism, ed., Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Aarhus University Press, 1998).

A Historical Guide to James Baldwin

Douglas Field

Reviews and Awards

"A Historical Guide to James Baldwin is welcome and timely. It caps a decade of renewed
interest in this major twentieth-century figure and sets the terms of debate for the decade
to come. Moreover, as a Baldwin scholar and a student in an undergraduate seminar on
Baldwin, we can testify to how it speaks to scholars at all levels and lends itself to course
adoption...This collection belongs on the shelf of any Baldwin scholar, student, or aficionado." --Brian Norman and Lauren A. Wilson, Callaloo